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Ch F-X ang PD e 1 w Click to buy NOW! w m o w c .d k. ocu-trac PETROLEUM HISTORY SOCIETY OIL SANDS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT TRANSCRIPT DON THOMPSON, BA, MA, MBA, PRESIDENT, THE OIL SANDS DEVELOPERS GROUP (OSDG) AND CORPORATE SECRETARY & GENERAL MANAGER, ENVIRONMENT, HEALTH & SAFETY, SYNCRUDE DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: 1952, SNOWLAKE, MANITOBA Date and Place of Interview: 9 am, July 29th, 2011 in his St. Albert home. 107 Otter Crescent St Albert, AB T8N 7H3 Home Tel. 780-470-5745 Name of Interviewer: Adriana A. Davies, CM, PhD Name of Videographer: David Bates Consent form signed: Yes Initials of Interviewer: AAD Last name of subject: THOMPSON AD: My name is Adriana Davies and today I’m interviewing Don Thompson. It’s July 29, and the interview is starting at 9:50 a.m. Don, thanks so much for agreeing to be interviewed for the Petroleum History Society Oil Sands Oral History Research Project. Could you tell me when and where you were born and give me a summary of your life, a biography if you will. DT: Well, I was born in 1952 in a place called Snow Lake, Manitoba, coincidentally a mining town, in northern Manitoba. Dad was in the RCMP, so we moved around a lot. I’ll skip over to university. I did my undergraduate degree, honours zoology, at the University of Alberta. Then I did a master’s degree of forestry at the University of Toronto. I consulted for a couple of years, doing studies of Sponsors of The Oil Sands Oral History Project include the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation, Athabasca Oil Sands Corp., Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Canadian Oil Sands Limited, Connacher Oil and Gas Limited, Imperial Oil Limited, MEG Energy Corp., Nexen Inc. and Syncrude Canada. Ch F-X ang PD e 2 w Click to buy NOW! w m o w c .d k. ocu-trac High Arctic mammals, along pipeline routes, and then joined Syncrude in 1979 in their environmental department. From there I became executive assistant to the then-CEO, moved into becoming in charge of owner-investor relations, rose in that line of work to the position of corporate secretary, and then began adding functions, such as environmental affairs, Aboriginal affairs, public affairs, travel. Of course, the regulatory affairs, reclamation and the like, and health, safety, and risk management. So my title when I retired from Syncrude was Corporate Secretary and General Manager, Environment Health and Safety. That happened about 2007, but it happened so that I could become president of the Oil Sands Developers Group, a role that I held for four years until, coincidently, yesterday, so I’m now on my second retirement. AD: Tell me about your industry involvement, even before the oil sands. DT: I guess in need to goes back to my consulting history. In 1976 or ’77, I began consulting in the environmental affairs area. In those days, environmental legislation was new. In fact, Alberta had just passed, or maybe hadn’t quite finished, its environmental legislation, and I believe Alberta was among the leaders in Canada. In any event, I began doing work on High Arctic pipeline routes—two in particular, the pipeline routes down the west side of Hudson’s Bay from gas gathering systems on Ellesmere Island—the so-called Polar Gas Pipeline route—and then the pipelines down the McKenzie Valley, including Dempster lateral, and up to gas and oil fields in the northern and western part of the Yukon and in the McKenzie basin. So it goes back to the mid-’70s, I guess. AD: What was the name of the consulting firm you worked for? DT: It was called Renewable Resources Consulting Services. It was started by a fellow named Ron Jakimchuk and his partner named Glen Semenchuk. It was, along with a firm called I think LGL Limited, one of the first environmental consultant firms, that I’m aware of, in Western Canada. Even though it was the mid-’70s, we were still somewhat of a pioneer in original environmental consulting-type work. AD: In terms of your academic studies, had you been trained to do environmental impact assessments? How did you go about doing it? DT: Well, my view is that I was trained as a classical, if you will, scientist. In other words, I wrote a thesis and was trained academically. But environmental impact assessment work builds on the logic that you get and the discipline that you get from learning an academic discipline. So I think that successful people in the environmental assessment area must have solid academic credentials in core areas. You look around today and you see a lot of these degrees that have names that I don’t recognize, but I think classical training is what’s important. It teaches you how to think; it teaches Sponsors of The Oil Sands Oral History Project include the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation, Athabasca Oil Sands Corp., Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Canadian Oil Sands Limited, Connacher Oil and Gas Limited, Imperial Oil Limited, MEG Energy Corp., Nexen Inc. and Syncrude Canada. Ch F-X ang PD e 3 w Click to buy NOW! w m o w c .d k. ocu-trac you how to think logically. And that’s really what all of us brought to the original environmental impact assessment-type work back in the mid, early ’70s. AD: Tell us about your work on these Arctic projects. When did they come up? DT: Most of them, at least the ones that I wrote, came out from ’76, ’77, ’78. I joined Syncrude in ’79. Some of them were in fact published in academic journals, particularly the work I did on caribou in the northern Yukon and in the Keewatin District, around Baker Lake and north in the Arctic Islands, so it would have been in that time frame. AD: And what were some of your findings? DT: Well, the findings were to define caribou herd potential interaction with pipeline routes, so really what we looked at was habitat use, migration patterns, that sort of thing, relative to proposed pipeline routes. AD: How did you get involved in the oil sands? DT: Well, while it sounds quite romantic to spend long periods of time in the High Arctic, recognize that I was obviously much younger then, there were periods of three or four months where we were camping literally on the Barrens in the middle of nowhere and obviously quite a long distance away from family and new wives and things like that. So, in fact, it was a decision to have a little bit more of a regular lifestyle. So I came south to Fort McMurray, if you will, in ’79 when I joined Syncrude. Actually, I joined Syncrude in Edmonton, because in those days their corporate offices were in Edmonton, but they soon moved them to Fort McMurray. For me, it was a regularization of life. I had a job that had me in one or two locations. It did not have me travelling for months and months on end and that to me was quite a benefit. AD: How did you get your job? DT: It was advertised in the paper. I applied; went through an interview process and the like. In fact, the fellow who hired me I still keep in touch with. We actually had lunch together not that long ago. So just applied from the paper. AD: What was the job? Sponsors of The Oil Sands Oral History Project include the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation, Athabasca Oil Sands Corp., Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Canadian Oil Sands Limited, Connacher Oil and Gas Limited, Imperial Oil Limited, MEG Energy Corp., Nexen Inc. and Syncrude Canada. Ch F-X ang PD e 4 w Click to buy NOW! w m o w c .d k. ocu-trac DT: The original job was—I remember the title, Environmental Co-ordinator. And I had a number of roles. One was that Syncrude had to update its environmental impact assessment predictions and forecast. So I wrote the second EIA [Environmental Impact Assessment] that Syncrude did. It was an update to the first one. I also had a role in environmental communication. In those days, we did a lot of communication with the public on environmental aspects of the Syncrude project, and that was the second part of the entry-level job. AD: How did the job at Sycrude relate with your consulting work? DT: Well, in terms of the Environmental Impact Assessment update, it was very similar, of course, but in terms of the environmental communications that was a new field for me. Getting out into communities and talking with people, communicating with stakeholders was something that as a consultant I hadn’t done. So learning how to communicate with the public was new for me. And I know that sounds strange, but communication is in fact something that you need to learn, because talking to stakeholders, talking to people who don’t understand intimately the project that you’re talking about, is a learned skill and something that needs a lot of practice. That for me was the new area of endeavor. AD: Tell me about the first Environmental Impact Assessment that you did for Syncrude. DT: As I recall, it involved going out, reviewing what had been said in the initial impact assessment, and determining did that still hold true. Did it need to be updated in terms related to changes in the project or new findings or whatever? And, as I recall, it basically showed that the project was on track relative to what we had said.

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